There are enormous stacks of munitions ready and waiting now, and they are a mere handful to the munition mountains that are going to come along in ever increasing quantity month by month. You men who clung to your battered and water-logged trenches that winter while the German shells pounded them and you to pieces and our own guns were making a cruelly feeble reply, you gunners who heard the angry demands and the pitiful pleas of the suffering infantry for “retaliation” and a heavier fire and the silencing of this battery or that _minnenwerfer_, and had to smother your savage longing to “let ’em have it” because you were short of shells, you will understand the joy that has lately been mine to stand and look at massed rows and ranks of big fat howitzer shells awaiting shipment, to watch the wide sea of lathes whirling and buzzing, eating up length after length of steel and brass rods, turning out fuse-parts and one bit or another of weapons and projectiles, to hear store managers wonder how or where they are going to house the growing output, to be told, as I have been told time and again, that the factory is running night and day, week in week out, that the present output is to be doubled in the next month or two months, that the full volume will be reached in February or March, April or May, as the case may be. That last was perhaps the most cheery feature of a completely cheering tour--the constant assurance that larger premises were in contemplation or course of construction; that extra hands were being taken on, or sought, or trained; that further machinery was on order, or coming in, or being installed; that present output is only a beginning and is to be added to by half as much again, or to be doubled, or trebled. I didn’t have to be satisfied with hearing these things, either; to be content with the mere telling; to be left at the end wondering if it was all a mere vague wish or hope or an empty boast, and doubting whether the spring, like last, would see the hopes squashed and the boasts fallen flat. I had plain enough proof meeting me at every turn that there was a solid and businesslike backing to all the boasts and promises. Here I could see a score of huge lathes with the packing being stripped from about them, there a wide cement floor being spread, new storeys sprouting in a tangle of scaffolding and steel girders on existing works, half-built forges and furnaces rising gaunt from a sea of bricks and mortar and cement. I drove headlong for hours in a fast motor or tramped interminably over wide areas where brick and wood huts and houses and workshops ran, row upon row, township after township, all empty of munition men or machinery, but all clattering and echoing to the saws and hammers of the workers who drove the job to the quickest possible completion. The promises I got, and that I gladly pass on to the Front, were not only by word of mouth; they were in solid brick and stone and wood, shining steel and brass